One of the biggest management challenges anywhere is how to improve student performance in urban public schools in the United States. There has been no shortage of proposed solutions: Find great principals and give them power; create competitive markets with charters, vouchers, and choice; establish small schools to ensure that students receive sufficient attention--the list goes on. Although these approaches have created positive changes in individual schools, they have failed to produce a single high-performing urban school system. In this article, the authors, who are members of Harvard University's Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), explain why. One reason, they say, is that educators, researchers, and policy makers see the district office, which oversees all the schools in a district, as part of the problem rather than a crucial part of the solution--and this is a mistake. The district office plays an important role in developing strategies, identifying and spreading best practices, developing leadership capabilities at all levels, building information systems to monitor student improvement, and holding people accountable for results. The authors propose a holistic framework that district leaders can use to develop an improvement strategy and build coherent organizations to implement it. The framework is based on three beliefs. First, school systems need their own management models; they cannot simply import them from the business world. Second, "the customer" is the student; therefore, urban districts need to focus on improving teaching and learning in every classroom at every school. Third, district leaders must design their organizations so that all the components--culture, systems and structures, resources, and mechanisms for managing stakeholders and the external environment--reinforce one another and support the implementation of the strategy across schools.

Describes ongoing systemic reform efforts in the Chicago Public Schools. Introduces the concept of "differentiation and integration," a managerial approach emerging in public school systems that couples "differentiated" treatment and support for individual schools with efforts to "integrate" the work of all schools and the district's central offices around a coherent improvement strategy. Participants have an opportunity to diagnose the circumstances in the 617-school district that drive CPS leadership to manage through differentiation and integration in order to improve student and school performance at scale. The discussion will enable participants to evaluate the district's actions to date; analyze key roles, structures, and functions that facilitate effective differentiation and integration; and identify major challenges to strategy execution.

Examines how a school district can differentiate its management of high-performing vs. high-need schools based on a variety of indicators, including performance and capacity at the school level.

The PELP Coherence Framework is designed to help district school leaders identify the key elements that support a district-wide improvement strategy, bring those elements into a coherent relationship with the strategy and each other, and guide the actions of people throughout the district in the pursuit of high levels of achievement for all students. The Framework is intended to help school district leaders effectively implement their strategy by strengthening coherence among actions at the district, school and classroom level, and ultimately, improve student performance at scale. Achieving high-performance at scale--in every school, for every student in a district-- is an imperative for school systems given today's heightened accountability environment. The framework emerged out of interactions with hundreds of U.S. public school leaders eager to identify ways to better organize and manage their complex organizations. Although it resembles models used in the business and nonprofit sectors, the framework was designed to fit the unique context and challenges of managing in public education.

Explores the concept of strategic alignment within a public school district.